


A Scene at the Sea

by bible



Category: JUDGE EYES: 死神の遺言 | Judgment, 龍が如く | Ryuu ga Gotoku | Yakuza (Video Games)
Genre: Drabble, Friendship, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Spoilers, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-17
Updated: 2020-02-20
Packaged: 2020-10-20 07:42:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20671730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bible/pseuds/bible
Summary: Maybe tomorrow they can go surfing.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> major spoilers for judgment, this is set after the events of the game

Okubo sits in front of the fuchsite green ocean in a linen button-up. There is a serenity on his face that’s almost mannequin-esque, his features still and unmoving. His eyes don’t even seem to stray from some fixed point on the effervescent sea foam that crashes against the cliffs, eroding at it over time.

His bare heels dig into the wet sand. It’s gloomy overhead, the sky crowded with bunched, grey clouds, but Okubo doesn’t mind the wind that tosses his strands of greasy, ink-dark hair across his face. Yagami keeps spitting out thrown streams of sand that catch in his lips in the pre-tumultuous weather, but he won’t ask Okubo to leave anytime soon.

_ “What’s with that outfit?” Kaito asked, walking into the office that morning with a can of Boss Coffee._

_ “You don’t like it?” Yagami tugged at his tacky Hawaiian shirt, a red one patterned with white hibiscus flowers. He grinned crookedly and took the cold coffee from Kaito, drinking after him, “I’m going to Okinawa.”_

_ “What? When?”_

_ “Today.”_

_ “You didn’t tell me?”_

_ “I just did.”_

_ “I want to go!”_

_ Yagami shook his head and shifted his backpack. It was indicative of a short trip. “Not this time, Kaito-san. I’m going with Okubo.”_

_ “What?”_

Yagami sits beside Okubo, watching him watch the sea, and he wraps his arms around his knees, “I’m sorry about the weather. I thought it’d be sunny.”

Okubo finally drags himself out of whatever reverie he’s in and looks at Yagami with dry eyes for once. He looks so serene, so unburdened. It calms Yagami, who gives him a soft, apologetic upturn of his lips. It’s relaxing to see Okubo without the tremulous fear on his face, that perpetual anticipation of bad news. He’s actually pretty cute, when he’s not on the verge of tears. He has a handsome, upturned nose, and full, rose petal lips. His skin isn’t aged from worry the way he expected it to be, still smooth save for divots of wrinkles between his straight, dark eyebrows. He has big eyes, and they look so much healthier without that yellowish film of exhaustion, without tear-clumped eyelashes. Being out of prison has given him a warmish glow. He looks less sickly than he did at the trial, at the horrible in-between years of lost life.

With the way Okubo sits back on his palms and stretches his legs out languidly, the cold Pacific lapping at his feet, you’d hardly guess what he’s dealt with. Yagami sighs and picks up a whole seashell, opalescent on the inside. He drags his thumb over the smooth surface.

“You’re stronger than me.”

Okubo looks at him with a tilted head.

“I’d be so much more vindictive if I were you. At the world. At me, even.”

Okubo’s blink is slow, cat-like and affectionate, “It’s hard to be vindictive whenever you’re relieved. I’m happy that everyone sees what I’ve always known. Reality is validating. Whenever there’s cohesion among humans, I guess there’s also security.”

Yagami swallows, looking at the ocean. He wants to keep Okubo away from that cliffside overlook.

“Did you ever doubt yourself?”

Okubo shakes his head, “I never let my reality slip. If perception is reality, then I couldn’t let my mind allow itself to match my accusers. I’ve always known my own truth. If I didn’t believe myself, no one would. I always held out hope. Always.”

Yagami sets the shell on his own knee. Okubo continues.

“Not just in myself, but in you. If I believed myself, I thought you would too. And then you did. What if I had failed to? Maybe you wouldn’t have come back, three years later, and told me what you did. I—You’re one of the only people I had left to count on.”

Yagami shoves his shoulder lightly, blinking, “Stop it. You’re gonna make me cry.”

Okubo grins then—a real smile. Yagami notes his big, white teeth, very clean looking and strong.

“It wasn’t easy though. You know, while I always believed myself, I wondered if the belief itself was a symptom of psychosis. Although I never thought I killed Emi, I thought that maybe I was living in some separate world, or something. The way a crazy person sees a terrifying image; it’s real to them, but it can’t be confirmed by anyone else. But the crazy person still saw it, and so it exists, even if it isn’t tangible. My innocence might have been my ‘image’ of sorts… Does that make any sense?”

Yagami nods, frowning up at a sky turning evening dark, violet like a bruise. Behind them, on the isolated street in front of a smattering of small homes, a truck slowly rolls by. The headlights make a halo of gold settle behind Okubo’s hair, just for a second.

Then it passes.

“I know what it’s like to feel like you’re slipping, like you’re in some fissure of the real world where you keep talking to people, but no one speaks your language anymore.”

_ Flopping on the couch with a pout, looking like an oversized toddler on the verge of a tantrum, Kaito whined, “Why can’t I go? Just because Okubo invited you doesn’t mean—”_

_ “He tried to kill himself, Kaito.”_

_ Kaito’s face immediately softened, the frown shattering like glass._

_ “Are you serious?”_

_ Yagami sat beside him and slouched as if in defeat, forearms resting over his knees. “These dumbass filmographers wanted to do a documentary on the case. He accepted, but during an interview, they started grilling him about the incident where he broke Emi’s finger. They kept insinuating he was an abuser, that even if Shono hadn’t killed Emi, that Okubo would have inevitably, given his ‘violent past.’ I can’t imagine what he was feeling like. Absolved of all crimes. Innocent beyond all measures. And people still telling him he hated his girlfriend enough to murder her. To his _face_. They’re scum.”_

_ “So he tried to kill himself?”_

_ “Well, I don’t know if it was _intentional_, but finding him with a belly full of sleeping pills after a bad day of pseudo-accusations—all over again—surely doesn’t seem coincidental, or accidental. I’m sure he felt—”_

_ “The same as he did in the police station,” Kaito exhaled a breath, shaking his head slow and emphatic._

_ “Right. Or at trial. Well, when I got called about it, the nurse said he wanted to see _me_. So I went. He, uh… He said he wanted to see the beach. That he hadn’t been out of a metropolitan prison for years.”_

_ Kaito smiled._

_ “Give him my regards, Yagami. You’re a good guy, taking him to Okinawa.”_

_ Yagami waved it off. But his ego swelled._

The air begins to smell cool, like rain and salt. It’s a fitting scent for Okubo, Yagami thinks.

“I wish Sugiura could have come with us,” Yagami says, lifting the seashell and placing it on Okubo’s knee.

“Me too. I like him.”

A fat droplet of rain splatters on Okubo’s forehead, and he looks heavenward, blinking a little. The rain begins falling, and they’re without cover, but Yagami doesn’t mind. It relinquishes them from the humidity of a late September day.

“Maybe I’ll move out here,” Okubo suggests. The thought doesn’t sit well with Yagami. Okubo is already of the precipice of suicide, and the idea of him being so close to an ocean, with no one he knows nearby, makes him think of the poor guy throwing himself off that eroding cliff someday. Sugiura’s the one who found him passed out in the apartment, who got him medical attention. He can’t even place a hospital in this remote vicinity of an island.

But an escape from Kamurocho, where people know his name and face, and finding a place to start anew—he gets it. Okubo’s white leg tucks itself against his chest. Sand coats it like sugar. His white shirt is becoming transparent, sitting over his prominent ribcage, giving him the washed-up look of a drowned ghost.

“You like the ocean a lot, huh?”

“Yeah. Emi did too.”

Yagami doesn’t ask him for a story, or a memory, or a dream. He just watches the grey sea ripple with rainwater and feels his shirt stick to his skin, his hair slick across his forehead, his scalp dampening in the downpour.

Maybe tomorrow they can go surfing.

Okubo rests his head on Yagami’s shoulder and watches the tide roll in.


	2. Chapter 2

“Emi used to like sardines.”

“Yeah,” Sugiura confirms, cracking the top of the tin, peeling the foil away. The fish inside are glossy with oil, “She’d eat them like chips. I used to make fun of her for it. She always liked salty things.”

There’s a smirk on his lips at the memory. “We would go to this Taiwanese grocery store all the time because it sold her favorite brand. She’d take the train there because our parents weren’t about to walk all that way just to get some canned fish. I can’t remember the name of it now, but this’ll do.”

Okubo puts his fist on his chin. Their legs are entangled under the kotatsu.

“Fish for Valentine’s day.”

Okubo’s eyes are heavy with sleeplessness. Behind his head, a large window, floor-to-ceiling, displaying the February landscape of Okinawa. Early in the evening: a white sky, bunched clouds like cotton candy reflected on the surface of a pinkish sea, a few reeds drifting behind him. Lace curtains half-drawn, doing little to obscure the light, only softening it.

Sugiura pushes his toes against Okubo’s bare inner thigh, still sticky.

“You like it here?” he asks.

“Yeah,” Okubo says, stretching his long, white arms out over the table. He buries his forehead between them, hiding his face. A piece of black hair falls from the band keeping it in a loose bun at the back of his head.

Sugiura, tempted to brush it off the slope of his neck, occupies himself with plucking a fish from its packed bed. He puts it between his lips and bites down. Soft, boneless. Oily and slick. Not unlike giving head to Okubo that morning.

He finishes it.

“You like sardines?”

Okubo’s affirmation is a shaggy nod against the tabletop.

“You want some?”

Okubo lifts his head and opens his mouth. Sugiura, ever willing to please Okubo, places another on his tongue and leans over to push it onto Okubo’s. Okubo grunts in surprise at the odd, intimate gesture. It’s no chocolate-dipped strawberry, but he’s never had a sweet tooth. Emi didn’t, either.

Sugiura looks so similar—those small, perceptive eyes. A plush, kissable cupid’s bow. Skin clear as porcelain, a fine bridge of his nose that he sucks on often, the same way he did to Emi, both of them reacting with the same sigh-giggle.

Okubo chews and swallows. The flavor floods his mouth as something strong but not entirely unpleasant. Sugiura laughs. Different teeth. Emi’s were straight. Sugiura’s bottom row is crooked. In the back, a filling that indicates he might have a sweet tooth.

“You’re not a replacement,” Okubo says suddenly, more to convince himself.

The strong taste of fish in his mouth.

Sugiura stops smiling.

“Okubo, you have a bad habit of pushing everything into the space between your bed and the wall.”

Okubo plucks an eyelash off the skin of Sugiura’s cheek, noting how black it is compared to the autumn of his hair—black as midnight.

**Author's Note:**

> [take my carrd](https://bibles.carrd.co/)


End file.
